Ithiel de Sola Pool

Ithiel de Sola Pool (October 26, 1917 – March 11, 1984) was an American academic who was a widely celebrated and often controversial figure in the field of social sciences and information technology.

The university was under the direction of Robert Maynard Hutchins, its president from 1929 to 1945, a period when it was called "the birthplace of modern American social sciences."

During World War II, Pool went to Washington, D.C., where, under Harold Lasswell, he studied and researched the effects of Nazi and communist propaganda.

[4] He held academic appointments at Hobart College, Stanford University, and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he joined the MIT Center for International Studies.

Most had personal experience with psychoanalysis and shared views of early critics of content analysis that counting the frequencies of words was simplistic.

Their vision was to develop capacities for empathy and build the study of communication flows as the equivalent investment for the wider social science understanding of the world that national income statistics achieved for the early growth of macroeconomics.

[7] This work and collaboration with Roger Hurwitz and Hirshue Inose (to organize an early census of communication flows in Japan and the US) were among the pioneering studies of the growth of the global information society.

Pool and collaborators (Abelson and Popkin) pioneered the first large-scale computer simulation of public opinion and election strategies for the Kennedy Presidential campaign.

Pool's analysis viewed MAD with an added understanding of the dangers of instilling fear and the demands of revolutionary movements for respect.

De Sola Pool was one of the leaders of the Simulmatics Corporation, a data science firm which used algorithms to target voters and consumers.

Pool quietly advised the American government's Voice of America and Radio Free Europe on their programs to evolve Communist regimes and build democratic oppositions in favor of freedom.

Pool believed that much social science work was roughly equivalent to journalism and deserved equal protections against prior restraint.